In a blog post, Musk said the acquisition was warranted because global electricity demand for AI cannot be met with “terrestrial solutions,” and Silicon Valley will soon need to build data centers in space to power its AI ambitions.
This dumb fuck. Unfortunately, his boosters will be all-in on this messaging. Whatever.
Heat dissipation was my very first thought. Musk’s whole premise is absolute horseshit with modern and even near-future tech.
It’s not a problem like “get heavy thing off ground”, where we can study principles of lift, throw fossil fuels at rocketry, etc. There is no magic bullet for “move this massive amount of heat somewhere else”; entropy has too much to say on the subject.
Space does let you dissipate heat via radiation (just not convection or conduction). Space radiators are a well understood and often-used technology.
The problem with space data centers isn’t the technology, we have the technology. It’s the cost. Everything in space is orders of magnitude more expensive than terrestrially. It’s simply not economically feasible to build a data center in space when you can build hundreds for the same cost on Earth.